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Cultivating trust
OPINION LETTERS Cultivating trust From Jason Reeves, Alastair Chisholm, William Pope and Peter Spillett, Environmental Policy Forum We welcome the debate over Environment Secretary Owen Paterson’s call for the UK to embrace genetically modified crops (newscientist.com/article/ dn23730). We agree the UK can be a centre for research excellence, and must play its part in ensuring sustainable food security for itself and the rest of the world. But what is needed is a balanced approach that maximises the longterm public and environmental good. GM crops promise to feed the world – for example, through varieties tolerant to drought and salt. However, most varieties have been developed for just two traits – herbicide and pest resistance. As Andy Coghlan points out (15 June, p 8), insects evolving resistance to plants modified to contain pesticide means these traits may cause more problems than they solve. Because the effects could be so detrimental to the environment, we support the firm application of the precautionary principle. Gaining public trust will need robust, evidence-led and transparent processes. The
This is not to advocate that there should be no safeguards, or that police-state surveillance should be the norm. The problem is that the politicisation of the leak that revealed such surveillance has caused many people to lose all perspective. Houston, Texas, US
government should urge agribusiness to publish the likelihood of known negative effects in their trials. This is the only way to build trust. Winchester, Hampshire, UK
Security needs From L. Clark The backlash over monitoring of online data by security services in the US and UK is highlighted in your editorial (15 June, p 5) and also in Hal Hodson’s article on how to avoid governments snooping on you (p 21). But governments cannot provide security without surveillance. If voters are happy with being significantly less secure but having more privacy, then fine. However, I suggest this would change after a couple of terrorist incidents.
Enigma Number 1757
Power point ADRIAN SOMERFIELD I have written a list of five different three-figure numbers, each of which is a power of a single digit. The first number is odd, and
thereafter each number has the same hundreds digit or the same tens digit or the same units digit as its predecessor. What, in order, are the five numbers?
WIN £15 will be awarded to the sender of the first correct answer opened on Wednesday 7 August. The Editor’s decision is final. Please send entries to Enigma 1757, New Scientist, Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS, or to [email protected] (please include your postal address). Answer to 1751 Rainbow square: The letters are RYGBVO The winner Gordon Walsh of York, UK
32 | NewScientist | 13 July 2013
From Tom Casey It is clear that the US National Security Agency is run by ageing hippies. One only has to read the “Split the difference” box in Hodson’s story and recall the album cover for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and the code name Project Prism instantly springs to mind. Craigie, Western Australia
Climate hope? From Bob Ward, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment It is great to see US president Barack Obama showing leadership on climate change (newscientist.com/article/ dn23758). But without the support of Congress for new federal legislation, he is fighting with one hand tied behind his back. The latest figures show that greenhouse gas emissions in the US in 2011 were 6.9 per cent below 2005 levels, compared with Obama’s target of 17 per cent by 2020. But they are still more than 8 per cent above 1990 levels, the international baseline. Moreover, this means Americans emit more than 20 tonnes of greenhouse gases per person each year. If the world is to have a reasonable chance of avoiding dangerous global warming of more than 2 °C, emissions will have to average no more than 2 tonnes per person by 2050. I hope Obama will take the argument to the American people and challenge the Republican party, which is in a state of denial about climate change. London, UK
Four’s a crowd From Tommy Ohlsson, professor of theoretical physics, KTH Royal Institute of Technology You report “evidence” for potential particles dubbed tetraquarks (29 June, p 16). It is true there is nothing in nature that prohibits particles made up of more than three quarks. However, the presently accepted theory says that quarks come in threes to make a baryon such as a proton or neutron, or in quark/ antiquark pairs to make shortlived mesons. If this tetraquark turns out to be a true particle made of four quarks and not just two mesons tightly bound, then quantum chromodynamics, the part of the standard model of particle physics that describes the strong force, will indeed need reformulating. Stockholm, Sweden
Free debate From Tim Johnson Barry Chapman, in his letter disputing the existence of free will, writes that the firing of a neuron “will have a cause and that cause will have another cause, all the way down” (29 June, p 31). But this is not a law of science. Events on the quantum scale obey the laws of probability not causality. If living things can “harness chance”, as Peter Ulric Tse puts it (8 June, p 28), then they can move the odds a bit in favour of free will. London, UK From Craig Webster I read Tse’s take on free will with interest, but I don’t see how his ideas solve anything. His claim is that we have free will because consciousness can freely adjust neuronal weightings, affecting the way they fire in the future. But how does this reweighting happen? All the usual philosophical problems apply, such as what is the nature of this free consciousness? All Tse has
This is not to advocate that there should be no safeguards, or that police-state surveillance should be the norm. The problem is that the politicisation of the leak that revealed such surveillance has caused many people to lose all perspective. Houston, Texas, US
government should urge agribusiness to publish the likelihood of known negative effects in their trials. This is the only way to build trust. Winchester, Hampshire, UK
Security needs From L. Clark The backlash over monitoring of online data by security services in the US and UK is highlighted in your editorial (15 June, p 5) and also in Hal Hodson’s article on how to avoid governments snooping on you (p 21). But governments cannot provide security without surveillance. If voters are happy with being significantly less secure but having more privacy, then fine. However, I suggest this would change after a couple of terrorist incidents.
Enigma Number 1757
Power point ADRIAN SOMERFIELD I have written a list of five different three-figure numbers, each of which is a power of a single digit. The first number is odd, and
thereafter each number has the same hundreds digit or the same tens digit or the same units digit as its predecessor. What, in order, are the five numbers?
WIN £15 will be awarded to the sender of the first correct answer opened on Wednesday 7 August. The Editor’s decision is final. Please send entries to Enigma 1757, New Scientist, Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS, or to [email protected] (please include your postal address). Answer to 1751 Rainbow square: The letters are RYGBVO The winner Gordon Walsh of York, UK
32 | NewScientist | 13 July 2013
From Tom Casey It is clear that the US National Security Agency is run by ageing hippies. One only has to read the “Split the difference” box in Hodson’s story and recall the album cover for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and the code name Project Prism instantly springs to mind. Craigie, Western Australia
Climate hope? From Bob Ward, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment It is great to see US president Barack Obama showing leadership on climate change (newscientist.com/article/ dn23758). But without the support of Congress for new federal legislation, he is fighting with one hand tied behind his back. The latest figures show that greenhouse gas emissions in the US in 2011 were 6.9 per cent below 2005 levels, compared with Obama’s target of 17 per cent by 2020. But they are still more than 8 per cent above 1990 levels, the international baseline. Moreover, this means Americans emit more than 20 tonnes of greenhouse gases per person each year. If the world is to have a reasonable chance of avoiding dangerous global warming of more than 2 °C, emissions will have to average no more than 2 tonnes per person by 2050. I hope Obama will take the argument to the American people and challenge the Republican party, which is in a state of denial about climate change. London, UK
Four’s a crowd From Tommy Ohlsson, professor of theoretical physics, KTH Royal Institute of Technology You report “evidence” for potential particles dubbed tetraquarks (29 June, p 16). It is true there is nothing in nature that prohibits particles made up of more than three quarks. However, the presently accepted theory says that quarks come in threes to make a baryon such as a proton or neutron, or in quark/ antiquark pairs to make shortlived mesons. If this tetraquark turns out to be a true particle made of four quarks and not just two mesons tightly bound, then quantum chromodynamics, the part of the standard model of particle physics that describes the strong force, will indeed need reformulating. Stockholm, Sweden
Free debate From Tim Johnson Barry Chapman, in his letter disputing the existence of free will, writes that the firing of a neuron “will have a cause and that cause will have another cause, all the way down” (29 June, p 31). But this is not a law of science. Events on the quantum scale obey the laws of probability not causality. If living things can “harness chance”, as Peter Ulric Tse puts it (8 June, p 28), then they can move the odds a bit in favour of free will. London, UK From Craig Webster I read Tse’s take on free will with interest, but I don’t see how his ideas solve anything. His claim is that we have free will because consciousness can freely adjust neuronal weightings, affecting the way they fire in the future. But how does this reweighting happen? All the usual philosophical problems apply, such as what is the nature of this free consciousness? All Tse has